Eric Puchner - Model Home

She peeled off her other shoe, leaving it on the embankment. Then she dove into her own reflection, a four-legged creature folding up like a card. Dustin waited for her to come up for air. A breeze rippled the water, erasing any evidence of her splash. The fear in Dustin’s throat froze into an icy dread. Maybe the toxins had dissolved her like a pill. Insects droned all around him; the effect was to make the silence seem even greater. As he was beginning to panic, wondering if he should run to the highway for help, Taz’s head broke through the water and she came up in the middle of the pond, gasping for breath.

Smiling, she swam back to the embankment and pulled herself out, her scarless body dripping in the sun. She got dressed and scaled the fence again and jumped partway to the dirt. Her hair was dark from the water. Dustin couldn’t help feeling there was something enchanted about her, as if she’d just returned from another world. He had the odd sensation that he shouldn’t look at her too closely.

“You smell terrible,” Dustin said.

“How many years did I shave off my life?”

He shrugged. “Five?”

“Let’s keep track. I want to die at twenty-five.”

Dustin noticed that her left ear was stippled with tiny scabs, just as he remembered. He wondered what he could possibly offer this sixteen-year-old girl, or why on earth she would want to visit him. He felt barely alive himself. Starting back, they passed the dead rabbit swaying gently in the breeze. Its face was aswarm with flies. The shape of it kept changing, a black mask simmering in the sun. Dustin found it almost beautiful, this face that wouldn’t stop moving, but decided not to mention this to Taz.

At work, Mikolaj was premiering his video about reproduction, Even Educated Fleas. Camille had suggested calling it Conception Is FUNdamental, a far better title, but he’d either forgotten her suggestion or ignored it on purpose. As for the video itself, Camille had watched a few minutes of it in the editing room: a little redheaded boy with a lisp talking about his “penith.” She felt bad for Mikolaj, of course, but some wicked part of her looked forward to the advisory committee’s verdict. He believed he could make a better video than hers; he’d have to learn the hard way, as Camille had, how unforgiving they were.

At least she’d bear no responsibility for it. They’d moved her out of visual media last September, after she’d returned from her month off tending to Dustin. It had been packaged as a promotion — senior text editor — but in hindsight she suspected it was because of the debacle with Earth to My Body: What’s Happening? It was hard to be too offended at the time, what with Dustin so much on her mind. And she had to admit she was good at her new job: in particular there was something about putting together the newsletter, assembling the jigsaw puzzle of graphics and text, that appealed to her. It was only recently, when they’d asked Mikolaj to direct something, that she’d started to feel betrayed. It wasn’t only his newfound competence that annoyed her. He was always stomping down the halls in that ridiculous ponytail, dropping names of directors she’d never heard of, as if he were God’s gift to the production department. He’d taken to wearing sunglasses on his way to the parking lot. He had an especially annoying habit of jotting ideas down on his hands, some times when you were speaking to him, so by the end of the day they were tattooed with words.

Seeing Mikolaj before the screening, however, pacing nervously in front of the auditorium in a brown suit and enormous wingtips, probably secondhand, Camille felt a stab of compassion. His eyes were bleary, as if he hadn’t slept well the night before. Camille missed the old Mikolaj, his puppyish ineptitude and disdain for small talk: these days he tended to talk about AA meetings and his “personal struggle.”

She offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head. “I’m trying to quit. It goes to set wrong example.”

“Right,” Camille said, lighting a Camel. Somehow, giving up drinking had made his English worse. She noticed that his hands were clean, scrubbed of ideas.

“I look to you nervous?” he said.

“The committee can be a bit petty. Just remember not to take it personally.”

Mikolaj nodded. It amazed Camille that she’d kissed this sleepless-looking man standing in front of her. If Warren hadn’t called her from jail that night, they might have done even more. After Dustin’s accident, in the frantic, heartsick months that followed, Mikolaj and their spur-of-the-moment kiss had been the furthest things from her mind. Neither of them had mentioned it again. In the meantime, he’d become sober, capable, a changed man. Uninteresting.

Now, as Camille took a seat among the board members and listened to their poised-for-battle voices, watching Mikolaj fiddle with the video projector stationed over the front row, she felt an old flicker of attraction. The feeling grew when she saw him sit down to collect his thoughts on his way to the podium, his sideburns dark with sweat, studying a yellow notepad in his lap. In his brown suit and gigantic shoes, he looked like a duck. A sitting duck. It took her a minute to realize it wasn’t him she was attracted to but the certainty of his doom.

“Thank you for come to see my new film,” Mikolaj announced to the room, “ Even Educated Fleas .” Silence. He cleared his throat. “Do you have any brief questions before the premiere?”

Rabbi Silverberg raised his hand. “I don’t get the title.”

“Please, we have the time only for questions,” Mikolaj said, scanning the room.

“I don’t get the title?” Rabbi Silverberg asked.

“It’s from your American Songbook, by Cole Porter. We’re using it as a sound track. ‘ Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. ’” This last part Mikolaj actually sang. He had a suave, angelic, unaccented voice, so incongruous with his appearance that the audience was momentarily struck dumb. Perhaps they’d ask Camille to take her old job back. Eventually Father Gladstone raised his hand, breaking the spell.

“Wasn’t Cole Porter homosexual?” he asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?” said Wendy Felsher of Planned Parenthood. She was sitting — deliberately, Camille suspected — in the same row as Father Gladstone. A large pin on her sweater said KEEP ABORTION LEGAL.

“Well, I don’t think we should be endorsing his lifestyle.”

“Are you suggesting he’s referring to male fleas?”

“Actually, some water fleas don’t mate at all,” said Lane Mazerra, who taught science at Laguna Elementary. “They reproduce asexually.”

Carl Boufis turned around in his chair. “By themselves?”

“Yes. They basically self-clone.”

“This is very stimulating discussion,” Mikolaj said, “and I would like to continue about flea sex at a later date. The film, in fact, is about human beings. Boys and girls of America talking about the fact of life.”

“You don’t worry it’s a bit dumbed-down?” Rabbi Silverberg said.

“Dumb down?”

“ Dumbed. To the kids’ level. We don’t want a repeat of last year.”

There was an awkward silence. Several of the committee members glanced in Camille’s direction. Mikolaj leaned into the podium, narrowing his eyes. “You use this expression because I am Polish?”

“No,” Rabbi Silverberg said. He looked stricken. “I wasn’t… I didn’t mean anything like that.”

Mikolaj smiled, and Rabbi Silverberg flushed with relief. “I kid with you. You should see a mirror. Anyway, Polish people are dumb. They put up with Soviet communist for forty-four years. But we are dumbing up, I think.”